Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill requiring state leaders to set limits on how public schools can restrain or isolate students.

Last summer, ProPublica and NPR reported that new federal data showed the practices – which can include pinning down or tying up students or locking them alone in dark rooms – were used more than 267,000 times nationwide in the 2012 school year. Hundreds of children are injured each year and at least 20 have died as a result. . . .

The new year is expected to bring yet another round of state laws to restrict abortion — and 2015 could also be the year a challenge to at least one of these laws could reach the Supreme Court.

The ongoing spike in abortion laws started after 2010, when Republicans won big in the midterms. Since then, state lawmakers have passed more than 200 abortion regulations — more than in the entire decade before. And with more statehouse gains in the fall elections, abortion opponents expect another good year.

‘The two states that stand out is where we are now able to stop bad legislation from happening,’ says Mary Spaulding Balch, state legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. ‘It looks like we have a pro-life majority in the Senate in the state of New York, which could prevent a bill that Gov. Cuomo was pushing that would have expanded abortion in New York, if you can imagine.’

The same political calculus goes for Washington state, Balch says.

Then there’s Tennessee, where a new constitutional amendment denies any right to abortion. That’s expected to clear the way for a string of regulations courts previously had struck down. . . .

Like any American family living paycheck to paycheck, Conrad Goetzinger and Cassandra Rose hope that if they make the right choices, their $13-an-hour jobs will keep the lights on, put food in the fridge and gas in the car.

But every two weeks, the Omaha, Neb. couple is reminded of a choice they didn’t make and can’t change: A chunk of both of their paychecks disappears before they see it, seized to pay off old debts.

The seizures are the latest tactic of debt collectors who have tracked the couple for years, twice scooping every penny out of Goetzinger’s bank account and even attempting to seize his personal property. For Goetzinger, 29, they’re the bewildering consequences of a laptop loan he didn’t pay off after high school; for Rose, 33, a painful reminder of more than $20,000 in medical bills racked up while uninsured. The garnishments, totaling about $760 each month, comprise the single largest expense in the budget.

‘I honestly dread paydays,’ said Goetzinger. ‘Because I know it’s gone by Saturday afternoon, by the time we go grocery shopping.’

Across the country, millions of other workers face a similar struggle: how to live when a large fraction of their paycheck is diverted for a consumer debt, as ProPublica and NPR reported Monday. The highest rates of garnishment are among workers who, like Rose and Goetzinger, earn between $25,000 and $40,000, but the numbers are nearly as high for those who earn even less, according to a new study by ADP, the nation’s largest payroll services provider.

Those who fall into this system find their futures determined by laws that consumer advocates say are outdated, overly punitive and out of touch with the financial reality faced by many Americans. . . .

If you like political satire set to music, tune in to the show that started at 7 p.m. C.S.T. tonight to enjoy The Capitol Steps radio show. Great entertainment for the Fourth of July before the fireworks. -CCE

Despite the fact that every major Internet provider has added some kind of encryption to its services over the past year, tracking your online traffic is easier than you think.

And you don’t have to be the target of the hacker or the NSA for your traffic to be intercepted. There is a hole in mobile security that could make tens of millions of Americans vulnerable.

Unsecure Wi-Fi networks have been a well-known vulnerability in the tech industry for years. They can let even the most unsophisticated hacker capture your traffic and possibly steal your identity. . . .

I have mentioned perma.cc and the problem of link rot before. It is a good solution but not quite perfected. When I have used it here on this blog, it is not always reliable, which is disappointing for something that shows such promise. Hopefully all the kinks will be worked out soon. -CCE

Just about anyone who’s gone online has encountered the message: ‘Error 404’ or page ‘Not Found.’ It’s what you see when a link is broken or dead — when the resource is no longer available.

It happens all across the Internet, on blogs, news websites, even links cited in decisions by the Supreme Court. It’s called link rot, and it spreads over time as more pages die.

These are natural deaths; links die when the server where the page first lived has closed for business, or a filter is blocking access. It’s annoying on sites like Buzzfeed and Gawker, but it’s worse when links go rotten on judicial decisions or works of scholarship.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, says that’s a serious problem.

‘It’s extraordinarily bad for the long-term maintenance of the information we need, say, to understand the law,’ says Zittrain, who helped create Perma.cc, a service to help judges, authors and scholars preserve links indefinitely. . . .